Mexican-American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968 (review)

With Mexican-American Mojo, Anthony Macias addresses an often overlooked period of Mexican-American cultural history: namely, the generation that came of age in Los Angeles during the New Deal years of the mid-1930s and culminated with the many currents that merged in the late 1960s to form the Chicano/a Movement. Employing the discerning eye of the historian, Macias rejects the temptation to over-generalize or to identify some essentialist elements of his topic. But through his regionalist and generational approach, he nonetheless provides cogent arguments and a highly readable narrative. "During this period," the author forthrightly concludes, "Mexican-Americans rejected second-class citizenship, transformed Los Angeles, and enriched American culture" (2).

The cultural enrichments that Macias discusses have proven both pervasive and enduring. They encompass both the "hep" wartime and "cool" postwar countercultures that exuded a "tough, working-class masculinity and femininity" (2). And they skirted the edges—but never acquiesced—to the dominant suburban culture. Rather than succumbing to the "melting pot," Mexican-American Angelenos claimed the urban space across their region, and "infused American culture with a sardonic, satirical, and improvisational Chicano style" (5). The young Mexican-Americans of the period, the author claims, have not been given due recognition for their influence for the laid-back Los Angeles styles in clothing and fashion that spread around the world. And, of course, the contributions made in the diverse Los Angeles Latin music scene—including the boleros, rumbas, Latin jazz, mambos, cha cha chas—are presented and analyzed here with relish.

Macias divides his book into five chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter acquaints the reader with a generation of Mexican-Americans who came of age in Depression-era Los Angeles, discussing their fads, favorite dances, and musical tastes that ranged from the jitterbug to modern jazz. Chapters two and three, by exploring the "cross-pollination" of African-American and Mexican-American culture in Los Angeles, provide perhaps the most interesting and compelling analysis of the study. The emergence of the African-American zoot suit craze, for example, greatly influenced the subsequent development of the Mexican-American pachucos and pachucas.

The social and musical connections between African-Americans and Mexican-Americans form an integral aspect of this history. Yet, while "multicultural urban civility expanded its scope and impact" (172), the Mexican-Americans also "managed to benefit . . . by exploiting the slight but significant advantages they enjoyed over African Americans" (5) in regard to social, racial, and class statuses. But even the use of the term Mojo in the title suggests the ways in which these two groups informed each other and, ultimately, the entire English-speaking world. Originally, a magical charm bag associated with Afro-Caribbean New Orleans, mojo would eventually come to suggest self-esteem, strength, and charisma. According to Macias, "Mexican-American Mojo" refers to "the power of Mexican-Americans as everyday historical actors to exert agency, choice, and free will in the face of multiple structural constraints" (3).

The fourth chapter of the book details the considerable activity of Mexican-American Angelenos in the doo wop, rock and roll, and other musical crazes as they swept through the region in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the book's final chapter reiterates and expands upon earlier discussions while reemphasizing the generational aspect of the study. Far from being portrayed as victims, Mexican-Americans as presented by Macias rejected an Anglo-imposed cultural identity and repudiated segregation by "participating in a sophisticated, Spanish-language Latino cosmopolitanism, through which they demanded dignity" (7).

Perhaps the most compelling aspects of this book derive from the more than forty oral histories and interviews referenced therein, most conducted by Macias himself. As the author correctly claims, his study is enriched tremendously by the implementation of oral history methodology. And the Mexican-American generation members themselves valued the oral tradition associated with informal music education as well...